Monthly Archives: October 2012

I’ve talked a bit about my work with automation, scripting, and AutoHotKey here, and today I was reminded of how imperative it is to not ‘show your hand’ unless it is in your best interests to do so.

Automating tasks is great. After your first useful script, you might even feel prideful. you might want to scream it from the rooftops – “I AM GOD HERE”

This man’s mistake? not shutting the f*ck up

But dont. Ignore the urge. there will be plenty of time for bragging when you’re old and senile. Telling your co-workers, peers, or (heaven forbid) bosses about your ability to automate tasks will only harm you in the long run. They’ll realize that part of your job can be replaced by a robot at no cost. They cant or wont take into account the ammount of knowledge necessary to maintain this system, nor the fact that it just doesnt run in perpetuity – it needs a trained, smart operator or it’ll fall apart upon the next update.

The truly cynical bosses will look at you taking longer than expected to complete a task and ask themselves “Why doesnt he just automate it?”

And as they see you automating more and more tasks, you’ll be expected to do more and more things – even if you’re pulling the weight of 3 other employees, they’ll load you down with more tasks. This is how it works.

So keep your damn mouth shut. Brag to your friends on fourchan. tell your cat. nobody cares. It makes your job easier and thats nice. But dont expect anything other than perpetual shit if your superiors find out.

I can imagine the inevitable question –
“but mister stress, how is this fair to the job creators?”

Me: “Is a slave morally obligated to keep his master informed?” – Listen. I’m not in the business of fair. I’m in the business of keeping you stress free. Do what you want, but 9 times out of 10, “fair” is going to get you shafted.

Posted by Stressman in Uncategorized

I have this mental problem – I fall into ruts and my train of thought begins to resemble something like:

“When does it ever end?”

and

“Well, atleast I can relax when I’m dead”

Thing is, If I’d have solved my problems when they were tiny annoyances rather than gigantic festering emergencies, I’d have less ‘on my plate’ and less urgency with which to do it.

And yet I dont. I start to become obsessed with this idea of getting “personal time” – that is, time to myself. time alone, with no cell phone, no interruptions, and no distractions. Quiet time. Where I can just chill out and let the worries of the day wash off of me. And as I carve off several hours each night to myself, I neglect everything else, and all of my little problems worries and responsibilities grow ever so slightly larger.

As these problems begin to loom, I stress and freak out, and seem to need even more ‘personal time’ in which i, once again, neglect these problems. Push them out of my mind. Drink, smoke, and stare off into space until the next morning. and once again, these problems arent anywhere near resolved.

This negative feedback loop continues until I:

a) start losing grip on reality (happened about a year ago…was pretty bad)

b) force myself to fix these problems that are now screaming at a fever pitch in my ears

or (often)

c) simply miss deadlines

Obviously, none of these are conducive to my mental or physical well-being.

Once you’re in this loop its hard to break out of it. I need to stay ahead of these little problems. If I squash these tiny problems early, well, sure – the problems still never go away. Its still a never-ending cascade of bullshit – but the bullshit is simpler. Easier to deal with in a relaxed fashion than if I let problems rot and stack up around me.

I’m off to solve a big problem of mine right now. What are you going to take care of this evening?

Posted by Stressman in Uncategorized

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle doesn’t seem to keep pace with a modern world. Atleast not with the pace with which we’re currently consuming.

I propose an alternative:

Stop, Repair, and Wear-Out.

Stop – as in “Stop Consuming”. Similar to ‘reduce’ – but taken further. Stop consuming. Now. You’re drowning in a sea of waste, lies, and faulty ‘american dreams’ foisted upon you incessantly by hucksters and con-men. Stop consuming. Dont reduce, dont ‘cut down’ – Stop.

Repair – Learn to repair what you own. Whether its learning to sew (a $3 sewing kit and some googling added 6+ months of wear to my ‘work pants’), learning to repair electronics, or simply learning to performs routine maintenance on your PC or car. Learn it, do it. Check out the Owners Manifesto

Finally, I bring you to:

Wear Out – Once you’ve stopped consuming and have learned to repair what you already own, this one will happen automatically. Take what you’ve got and wear it out completely. Drive your vehicle until the wheels fall off, wear and repair your clothing until you cant wear them anymore. Keeping that old PC around even 10% longer will save money, save headaches, save shelf space, and save our environment.

Sidenote, the vast majority of people have no idea when they ‘need’ a new PC – Remove the viruses and crapware from your current box and it’ll do facebook and email just as well as any new PC out there.

Posted by Stressman in Uncategorized

As embarrassed as I am to admit it –
I signed up for one of those crowd-sourced micropayment labor mills.
you know the drill – “Work from home!”, “Make money completing simple tasks”
They of course use “Work”, “Money”, and “Simple” VERY loosely here.

And I feel like I’ve been taken advantage of in the back of a dirty van.

“Dear God, why? are you that hard up for cash?” I hear you scream –

No. I’m not. So why did I sign up? Hell if I know. maybe I was bored. Maybe I cant justify a new gaming laptop and thought that over the course of a month I could scrape together enough pennies from something like this to buy one.

But of course I cant. nobody can. I effectively made maybe $0.25/hour, and to make matters worse they pay other “workers” to verify your work. These people can’t read, and they can’t think critically. They reviewed my work, rejected half of it, wrote their reasoning in barely comprehensible broken English, and now my “credibility” rating is wrecked so badly I cant even complete basic tasks.

“But mister stress” I hear you say – “Why would you EVER do something like this in your leisure time?”

I don’t know. I feel sick. I’ve been around long enough to know better. These labor mills are arguably the worst things to come out of capitalism in the last 100 years – And if this were the late 1800’s, we’d have burned cloudcrowd headquarters to the ground.

And I just realized that I often make more per day, hands off, from my meager  investment in Lendingclub than I would make in a full 8 hours on CloudCrowd (And I have no money in LC)

Moral of this story? Even if you don’t value your leisure time as much or more than your work time, some tasks simply aren’t worth doing. This goes doubly for tasks that allow others to make money off of your back.

Posted by Stressman in Uncategorized